• • Home
  • Undergraduate Study
• • Postgrad English
  • Postgrad Creative Writing
• • Research
  • Staff
• • News & Events
  • Contact Us
• • Resources for Current Students

Undergraduate Menu

Search using keywords/tags or full text search.

ENGL 373: Early Modern Outlaws on Land and Sea

Course Convenor: Dr Liz Oakley-Brown

Seminar Time and Venue: Wednesday 9am – 11am, Bowland North SR7 (Term 1)
Revision Seminar Time and Venue (Week 22 only): Wednesday 9am – 11am, Bowland North SR2
Film Screening Time and Venue (Weeks 1 and 7 only): Wednesday 2pm – 5pm, Bowland North SR7

Course Aims and Objectives:
From Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow (2003-) to Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood (2010), notions of outlawry haunt twenty-first century popular culture and recent academic debate (see Phillips (ed.) 2005 and Jowitt (ed.) 2006). A fascination with renegade figures is also found in the early modern period. Developing first and second-year work on critical and theoretical approaches to literature, the course examines representations of Robin Hood (weeks 2-5) and pirates (weeks 7-10) in a range of generically distinct sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts.

Assessment: 1 x 2,000 word essay (40%); final examination (60%)

Contact:
10 x 2 hour seminars.

Set Texts:
You will be asked to purchase scholarly editions of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Pericles. Other primary materials will be offered as scanned texts via MOODLE and links to scholarly electronic archives.
For further reading, see the course MOODLE site.

Course Structure:

See the Moodle site on a weekly basis for seminar questions.

Week 1: Introduction: Fashioning Early Modern Outlaws on Land and Sea
*Film showing: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

Week 2: Figuring Robin Hood in Play-Games and Ballads
Including Anon:  ‘The Gest of Robin Hood’ (c.1550)

Week 3: Gender, Class and Munday’s Marian
Anthony Munday: The Downfall and The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntington (c. 1598); Michael Drayton:  ‘Robin Hood’s Story’ (1622)

Week 4:  Arden’s Outlaws
William Shakespeare: As You Like It (c.1599)

Week 5:  Outlaws and Witches
Ben Jonson: The Sad Shepherd (c.1630)

Week 6: Independent Study Week

Week 7: Francis Drake: Privateer or Pirate?
Including Henry Robarts: ‘A most friendly farewell […] (1585) and George Peele: ‘A farewell […]’  (1589)
*Film Showing: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Week 8: Pirates and Marginality
William Shakespeare: Pericles (1607)

Week 9: The Sexual Politics of Piracy
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger: The Double Marriage (c.1621)

Week 10: Punishment and Praise
Scaffold speeches and ballads including Anon: Clinton, Purser and Arnold, to their countreyman wheresoever (1583) and Anon:  A True Relation of the Life and Death of Sir Andrew Barton (1630)

Week 22: Exam Revision

Back to: ENGL 371

Forward to: ENGL 376

Courses Index